subject: An All-New Insulin Administration Approach [print this page] An All-New Insulin Administration Approach
Oftentimes, to countless parents all over the world, whose children have diabetes, sleeping at night is the least thing they have in mind.
A concern of parents whose children have diabetes is that if they fall asleep they might not monitor the lowering of blood glucose amounts of their children and might result in endangering their lives.
For this reason, parents have watchfully tended on their children as they sleep, just to be sure they wake up in good condition in the morning. However, there is now an innovative medical device designed specifically for this medical condition.
This new medical progress is a device that can determine a child's blood sugar amounts at nights, and can manage to regulate insulin quantity through an attached administration pump. The British medical specialty magazine, The Lancet, has just given an account on this progress, and forecasts that manufacturers of this medical device can be expected to promptly deliver and mass produce for the market soon.
Children with juvenile diabetes or technically called Type 1 diabetes, before this new medical device, had been using a blood sugar level monitoring equipment that works continuously overnight and a separate insulin administration pump.
Juvenile diabetes is something youngsters can develop any time. I have a friend whose 3-year old son developed Type 1 diabetes, and it was hard on the whole family.
Children with diabetes need to have intricate medical device setup due to sudden decrease in blood sugar levels, or hypoglycemia, can drive a child into tremors, seizures, and possibly even a coma, or death. Also, children with this medical condition have blood sugar levels that fluctuate anytime, and a simple automated pump which administers insulin at timed intervals is not much effective.
In a study conducted among a group of young people in which a group was placed on the new device, and the other group was placed on the usual method. The typical method sounded the alarm for seriously reduced blood sugar levels for some children, but the system was incapable to reach in time.
You can find about half a million people in America with Type I diabetes, who use some variation in the typical insulin administration setup. One old procedure of blood glucose detection that is still common practice, involved using a system that sampled blood from a pin prick on the skin, several times a day. But new technologies measure blood glucose ranges with sensors attached to the skin.
But, cautionary measures should be taken when using this sensor along with an automatic insulin administration pump. An instance would be if sudden reduced of blood sugar amounts are detected the device sounds the alarm; however, if the person fails to hear this, the pump will keep on transmitting insulin into the blood to metabolize the absent glucose. This could develop into an extremely unsafe condition.
The new medical device was incorporated with the function of both devices, making it a two in one package that can determine proper blood sugar levels as well as regulate the insulin administration. The company of Johnson & Johnson, together with the Artificial Pancreas Project, is making an effort to produce this product device to the market in a portable sized package.
This may look like quite easy from plain viewpoint; however, this medical device relies on modern life science, along with accurate chip technology and computer programming technology, which when summed in total is a great deal of study and work. Precision monitoring device for blood sugar levels plus administration of the right insulin in time is a milestone for this group of sciences that work together to achieve this.
